Interview with Amy: The Abandoned Dog with Stage-Six Congestive Heart Failure

Amy’s dog days are NOT over...but they will be.

It’s a lazy March afternoon when I meet “Amy” for our interview. She lies with her kangaroo arms stretched out in front of her square, snub-nosed chest; dark-eyed, resting on a super-soft albiet lame-West-Elm white shag rug, I keep looking into her kooky-moony crazy granny eyes. What is going on inside her mind? I’m excited to interview her.

She attacked one of our five other dogs, Blondie, the other week. When I get close to Amy’s face to kiss her, she acts like she might bite my cheek or my nose off. I kind of want her to. She’s too sweet. I want her to be tough as nails. And there’s something else…a primal tension from having been abused before she was abandoned and having survived in the wild, where she was found half-starved-to-death with her paws bloody.

On this March day, the six of us recline in our 1960s, too-turquoise modernist living room—me, Amy, Jewely, Blondie, Frankie, and Walter.

The room previously looked, as Ariel Levy from The New Yorker quoted me as once saying, “like the home of a seventy-some-year-old woman.” She continued by writing, “he and Moshfegh recently unloaded a shipping container of furniture from his grandparents, and now there are tasseled pillows, a Barcalounger, ceramic terriers on the coffee table, paintings of horse-drawn sleighs on the wall. ‘It’s such a ridiculous set—it’s a total sitcom,’ he said. ‘I think of it as an art piece.’” Yep. That’s what I said…

Taking on a fifth dog feels sort of the same. Kind of absurd. An art form. But also, having so many animals allows your mind to dissapear into the Jungian consciousness of some ALL. Like being in a massive pile of bodies, you just forget who is touching whom.

It’s usually hot in our desert near Palm Springs. In the afternoons, we—me and the dogs—lie around on the shag rug like we’re already in the long days of summer. But those days and their heat are still a long way off, and it will get another forty degrees hotter. It’s 80 now. It’ll be 120 then. Outside, the rattlesnakes are starting to wake up, the littlest ones first.

Amy rests on a pillow, curled in a way that suggests comfort. But her slow, wheezing breathing says otherwise. Her heart is irregular, murmuring, compromised. It knocks about inside her chest. She is so lovable it almost hurts to know she won’t live to be a much older age — but it’s also one of the most beautiful things to me. I helped save her. When I got a call from a neighbor asking if she was mine, and I went over to see her, I could tell she’d been abandoned and looked like she was starving. I drove over in my old Mercedes and picked her up; when I got out of the car, I sat down on the ground, and she came running to me and licked me all over my face. DOG 5.

¹this car is free if you want it.

Amy has this flicker of wisdom in her eyes, then a cow-like stare of even greater, unknowable mystery. She looks like someone who firsthand feels that life doesn’t last forever. Suddenly, it’s sweeter in the body, mind, heart, and soul just to be near the not-to-live-too-long. Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," has a character named The Misfit who says, "She would've been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Something like that. That’s how I imagine it would be if we all felt like Amy.

Is our dog’s name really Amy?

I ask her.

LG: What is your name, dog?

Amy: (Just laughs a little and sneezes.)

I keep dispensing her pills twice a day. You can hear the wheeze of her lungs behind her ribs. Stage Six Congestive Heart Failure. You don’t get past it, not this far gone. But Amy’s here, alive. For now, and that is all that matters.

At forty-four, I have lost my brother, my grandfather, my grandmother, my uncle, my other set of grandparents, two aunts—and I’m preparing to lose some dogs. Jewely, a famous fixture in our lives, is the oldest. She was written into my first novel and has been photographed by major publications. At fifteen, she’s our grande dame, forty-five pounds, a rare age for a dog her size. Taking Amy in is preparation for loss. It’s put a pep back in Jewely’s step too. Jewely was found at 3 months old with a broken leg on the side of the highway in East Texas.

Amy was abandoned more recently—two months ago. The kind of abandonment you hope only exists in fiction. But Amy knows it’s everyday life for too many dogs. She started to wheeze and to throw up, which she does many times a day, and people get tired of the effort, the money, the time. They forget these animals have real emotions, real pain. But I’m getting carried away.

Amy looks at me with clear eyes. She doesn’t dwell on the why of it. She’s beyond that.

LG: What happened?

Amy: “One day, I had a home. The next, I didn’t. They didn’t say goodbye. They didn’t pause.”

Blunt. No bitterness. No dramatics. Just the facts for this white and pink dumpling covered in coffee spots. I can see how much it hurt her, but you couldn’t hear it in her voice. That’s not her style. She knows how to survive, even when survival’s an uphill battle. She knows the grass is bitter but fills the stomach. She’s barking in the yard, rolling on the rug, and learning to be held for what seems like the first time.

When Amy opens up about being abandoned, there’s no sob story. Just acknowledgment. A resolute acceptance. She doesn’t wallow, but you can see the exhaustion in her eyes.

Amy: “I don’t really think about the part where I was wandering anymore. It doesn’t help.”

Maybe it’s the heart failure—something about a ticking clock strips away the bullshit. She’s not here to entertain. She’s not here to be pitied. She’s here to live, as best she can, which is still pretty fucking awesome. She runs, she jumps, she gets all bouncy. Then she coughs, gags, wheezes.

Her breath comes in short bursts, her body heavy with the weight of its own struggles. The heart is a complicated thing, and hers is worn. Amy gets tired fast, and when she needs to rest, she rests. But when she’s up, she’s up with the others—Jewely lies around more than Amy. Or Jewely stares through walls, laughs at all our jokes, and sees the future. Walter, a terrier-poodle mix, always looks like he’s just been expelled from boarding school but he’s the gang’s cheerleader with bangs in his eyes. Frankie, Walter’s blood nephew, is a rabbinical mystic scholar and sensitive joker who loves to chase rats. And Blondie, his blood sister, is a punk french fry of distilled sunlight; she bites the head of the vacuum cleaner and would fit right in with an all-girl gang but she spends probably an hour a day licking Amy’s eye crusts. They are more than family. They are survival. They keep each other going.

Amy: “They’re good. They don’t judge. They know. We all know.”

Amy doesn’t need a happy ending. It’s enough to live comfortably—to eat to fullness, to find water in the dish, to lie in the sun on the porch, staring out at the vultures, heart pumping.

This is when she arrived:

1

I had to bring her to the vet. They found her chip and said they couldn’t treat her, but did diagnose her with stage six out of six congestive heart failure. She’d been abandoned and was starving and her paws were torn up. Since I could not get them to treat her, I asked what I could do. The Palm Springs Animal Shelter said that they couldn’t take her when I called because she’s been abandoned outside of the city limits. So I took her there anyhow because it’s the best shelter around and I told them I had found her outside of the Ace Hotel. They treated her and once she was ready for permanent foster, she came to live with us. The Palm Springs Animal Shelter is the coolest place in the world. They are so great. Please give them all your money.